It was already past quarter to five when he got off the tram at Italian Row. At the head of Pasaréti Street, Gordon lit a cigarette, turned up his collar, and continued forward through the drizzle. Parked in front of the building was Szőllősy’s car, a Maybach Zeppelin. Gordon flung away the cigarette butt and rang the bell.
In no time the maid, who had a shawl draped over her shoulders and who had clearly hurried downstairs, opened the door.
“Dear God,” she spurted out on seeing Gordon, “you’ve come back, sir.”
“Your master is already waiting,” Gordon announced. “The appointment is for five o’clock.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. She swallowed mightily, opened the gate, and let him in.
Gordon followed her into the house. In the vestibule he handed the maid his jacket and his hat. “I’ll call his lordship right away,” she said, leading Gordon into the living room.
“Call his wife in, too,” said Gordon, turning around. The girl shut the door behind her. Darkness reigned inside the room; a floor lamp was the only source of light. The lace curtain hanging over the window filtered out even that little light that got through the drizzle-permeated dusk. Gordon stepped over to the drinks, chose a bottle of American whiskey, and poured himself a glass. He hadn’t had a respectable glass of whiskey in quite a while. He took a sip and let the alcohol linger in his mouth. He then sat down in an armchair, crossed his legs, and waited.
The door opened. In walked Mrs. Szőllősy. When she saw Gordon, her face froze and the wrinkles hardened around her lips. “You,” she hissed furiously through her teeth.
“Me,” said Gordon, putting down his glass.
“If you want to grill me again about my daughter, you’re wasting your time. I have nothing to say to you.”
“I don’t know why you would have thought I’m here on account of your daughter,” he said, looking her in the eye, “but you’ve hit the nail on the head. Except that I’m not here to grill you. I already know almost everything there is to know about your daughter. True, there are still a couple of minor details, but I can clear those up while I’m here.”
The woman’s face turned pale as she listened. Staggering momentarily, she leaned up against the doorjamb.
“What’s that supposed to mean, that you know everything?” she asked hoarsely.
“Almost everything. But there are a few little details I have to clear up with your husband. I figured it wouldn’t hurt if you’re here, too.”
The woman seemed not to have heard what Gordon said. Her mouth began forming silent words. Gordon waited quietly.
“What . . . what happened to Fanny?” she whispered. “Something happened to her, right? What?”
Gordon wanted to answer, but just then the door opened once again and in stepped András Szőllőshegyi Szőllősy. The man bore a striking resemblance to the great actor Artúr Somlay. He was tall, and his exquisitely tailored English suit clung almost imperceptibly to his eminent belly. He walked with great confidence. His inquisitor’s gaze locked on Gordon at once. His sharp-featured face was topped off by silver, slightly curly hair combed back; and if he hadn’t had a carefully trimmed mustache under his nose, Gordon might in fact have thought he was seeing Artúr Somlay. While taking stock of Gordon with cold, gray eyes, Szőllősy now shut the door behind him.
“And who are you?” he asked in a tone of profound contempt. “I’m expecting an important guest, and it’s not you.”
“Are you waiting for István Bárczy?” asked Gordon.
Szőllősy was taken aback. “That is none of your business.”
“You can wait all you want for Bárczy. He won’t be coming, so you’ll have to make do with me. The undersecretary has more important matters to tend to than to waste his time on your type.”
Rage filled the man’s face. His eyes narrowed, and he tightened his hands into fists. “I asked who the hell you are.”
“Zsigmond Gordon, journalist with the Evening.” Gordon did not extend his hand, for he was certain Szőllősy would not accept it.
“Get the hell out of here,” Szőllősy thundered. “I don’t talk with hack writers.”
“András, he said he wants to talk with us about our daughter,” said his wife in a trembling voice.
A shadow passed over Szőllősy’s expressionless face, but Gordon wouldn’t have sworn to it. Before the man had a chance to speak, however, Gordon reached into his pocket, pulled out the autopsy report, and threw the first-page summary on the table.
“What the hell is this?” asked Szőllősy, not even glancing at the sheet of paper. But his wife hurried to the table, picked up the page, and began reading. The paper trembled in her hands. Szőllősy did not move. He looked at his wife and then at Gordon, who already knew he was right. He just sat in the armchair, paging through his notes, and waited.
The woman’s bosom was heaving uncontrollably. The blood drained from her face as her legs buckled. Slowly she sat down on the divan. “Fanny,” she groaned. “Fanny, my sweet little Fanny. My dear little girl . . .”
“What are you talking about?” asked Szőllősy, knitting his brows.
“Fanny’s dead,” whispered the woman almost inaudibly. Her eyes were red, though the tears were yet to flow.
“A while back I did have a daughter . . .” Szőllősy began.
“Did have a daughter,” the woman hissed. “Well, now it really is just did!”
“What are you talking about, Irma?”
“Sit down! Sit down already, God damn you!” his wife shouted in a rage.
At this, Szőllősy went slowly over to the writing desk, pulled out the chair, and sank into it. His wife meanwhile composed herself, stood, and after staggering only a bit she stepped over to the desk as straight as a ramrod. She threw the first page of the autopsy report on the desk. Szőllősy did not reach for it. “At least read the part about how she died!” the woman hissed.
Having taken an eyeglass case from his jacket’s inner pocket, the man now pulled out a pair of wire-frame glasses, put them on, and began to read.
“This doesn’t say a thing,” he said, slapping the page back down onto the table once he’d looked it over. “Besides, this is just the first page. It doesn’t even have a name on it. Nothing. This is just some dead girl.” Pushing the page away from himself, he added, “This doesn’t prove a thing.”
“No?” asked Irma, casting him a bewildered stare. “No?” she repeated, gasping for breath before she finally snapped. Her tears erupted, again her bosom heaved, and the air at times seemed stuck inside her throat. She tottered over to the divan, leaned against it with her left arm, and, hunched over, sobbed. Within a couple of minutes, though, she’d collected herself once more. She stood up straight. She took a handkerchief from under her sleeve and wiped her eyes. In vain. The tears gushed silently on. Szőllősy now raised his gray eyes to Gordon.
“You . . .” he began, gesturing with a hand toward the door, “you can just get out of here.” Gordon glanced at the woman.
“This man is not going anywhere,” Mrs. Szőllősy declared hoarsely. “He is not going anywhere until we’ve listened to what he has to say.”
“If you have a need for this, then go ahead, listen,” said Szőllősy, rising to his feet. “I’ve got business. I’m waiting for the undersecretary.”
Bowing her head, the woman stared up at her husband from beneath the lock of hair that had fallen over her eyes. She tightened a hand into a fist and stepped before him. “You have no business more important than this,” she said to him softly. “You are not going anywhere.”
The man hesitated for a moment only, for a fraction of a moment, but even that was enough for the suspicion to come over his wife’s face. Szőllősy cast Gordon a stealthy glance. He tried disguising his anxiety by reaching for the cigar case on the writing desk. He removed a cigar, slipped off its paper
band, and took out a little knife, with which he cut off the end of the cigar. He then thrust a thick match into the cigar so deep that only its tip was visible. Szőllősy stuck the cigar between his teeth and raised a lighter from the case. He lit the cigar and blew a thick cloud of smoke around himself. The woman now slowly turned toward Gordon and looked at him with anticipation.
“You can correct me if I’ve got it wrong anywhere,” Gordon began. He spoke in a dispassionate voice, looking rarely at the notes on his knee. “Your daughter, Fanny, returned from Paris this past spring. There she’d met Shlomo, Rav Shay’ale Reitelbaum’s son, who was likewise studying in Paris. Fanny announced that she was marrying the boy. You forbade this.” Gordon looked over at Szőllősy, who went on smoking. “Indeed, the same night you got in a car and went to the rabbi. What you did there I do not know, but it isn’t important. I doubt you paid him off; maybe instead you threatened him somehow or, perhaps, promised something.” Gordon cast Szőllősy another glance, but the man’s face didn’t even flinch. “The next day, the rabbi took his son to Hamburg and put him on the ship to New York. And you sat down with Fanny for a talk. It doesn’t take much imagination on my part to figure out what you spoke about and in what tone of voice, for by the end you’d disowned your daughter. Your wife didn’t dare confront you.”
“There’s no confronting you,” the woman hissed.
“So then, Fanny, who thus lost virtually all her friends and acquaintances, wound up out on the streets—on Rákóczi Street, to be precise. There, a petty criminal by the name of Józsi Laboráns, who keeps prostitutes, swooped down on her. Do you want to know how he does it?”
“Go ahead and tell him,” the woman replied. Gordon explained how Józsi Laboráns had terrorized their daughter. “Csuli, the gang leader, denied it, but I suspect that the man gave your daughter one helluva beating. Only then did he put her to work. You knew nothing at all about all this.” Gordon held a momentary pause, then looked at Szőllősy. “All the way up until two weeks ago, that is, when you got wind that a pretty young hooker had popped up at Red Margo’s.” Gordon watched the man’s every breath of air. He’d been certain of everything he’d said up to this point. But, here, he was just guessing. A muscle twitched on Szőllősy’s face. Gordon knew he was on the right track. He continued. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said to the man, who just sat there motionless, swathed in a cloud of smoke. “I see. Then I wasn’t mistaken. You and your politician chums are regulars at Red Margo’s place.”
“Don’t you sit there poker-faced!” Szőllősy’s wife shrieked at her husband, and in one fell swoop she swept the telephone off the corner of the desk. “You think I didn’t know? I even know her name, you wretch. Red Margo. What a lowlife you are.”
“In short,” Gordon continued, “the album—or catalog, call it what you will—wound up in your hands. I wouldn’t even be surprised if you paid a visit to the Parliament building for that very reason. To have a look at this new gal for yourself. Or maybe you saw the catalog not in the Parliament building but somewhere else. It doesn’t matter. You opened it up and saw your own daughter. Naked. Inviting. The way Skublics photographs the girls that come his way. I can’t imagine what you must have felt when you saw your own daughter in a catalog advertising prostitutes.” Gordon looked up at Szőllősy. “You won’t be telling us anytime soon, I imagine, and I don’t want to guess.”
“So that’s where the picture came from,” the woman muttered. Again the blood drained from her face. She staggered over to the divan and sat down.
“That’s where,” said Gordon. “Of course we mustn’t forget that your husband didn’t tell you a thing about this, just as you didn’t tell him you’d met up with Fanny. Not just once, in fact. You gave her money regularly.” Szőllősy only turned his eyes toward his wife. “But you didn’t know what your daughter needed the money for.” The woman shook her head in silence. Gordon continued: “She was saving money for ship fare so she could join Shlomo and so they’d have something to live on until they found work.”
Gordon leaned forward. “By the end of September, then, both of you knew what your daughter was involved in. Maybe even earlier. Only you didn’t tell each other.” Gordon looked at the woman. “You’d hired a private eye to figure out how Fanny was making money. The detective not only figured it out, but he even found a picture to prove it.”
Gordon fell silent, put his notes on the desk, and continued without them. “Both of you knew precisely what had happened to her, what she’d become.” He looked again at the woman. “You tried talking to her, persuading her, appealing to her better side. As for you . . .” Gordon turned back to the man. “You chose another path. You knew full well that if word got out about what your politician chums were using your daughter for, that would have been the end of you. To be more precise, you could have called it a day permanently had it come up whose daughter your buddies were romping about with. I can imagine what sorts of questions you would have been asked. Until now everyone had turned a blind eye to you. About you being a scam. A fraud. A Jew-turned-Christian doing business with the Germans. Not that there’s anything unusual or contemptible about that. But folks chummed up to you, no, not because you were called Valiant Knight András Szőllőshegyi Szőllősy, but because they knew you had to be rich, filthy rich, to get your hands on such a title. What are your merits, after all? What’s made you so worthy of the title Valiant Knight?” Szőllősy listened in silence. “You never took it upon yourself to publicly have a say in politics, and while I don’t know what party you fund, I suspect it’s the National Unity Party. That’s why folks schmoozed with you. Because you have money. You think your politician friends don’t know you’re a Jew? They know. Just like they know that, by now, you’re Catholic. But if someone had gotten wind that your daughter was a harlot, a prostitute to politicians—a girl who, moreover, wanted to reconvert to the Jewish faith so she could marry the son of a rabbi . . .” Here Gordon paused for effect, to let his words fade away in the utter silence of the living room. “And let’s not forget, either, that Mussolini meanwhile invaded Abyssinia. Which surely came in handy for you. No longer did you have to buy coffee from the Negus; you could do so straight from Mussolini. And since you’re on such good terms with Nazi business circles, you might have been able to finagle an even lower price out of the Italians.” Gordon looked at Szőllősy. “You think I haven’t kept an eye on stock prices? You think I don’t know how much you make on a hundred kilos of coffee? If you raise the price by just ten Reichsmarks, you can book yourself one huge profit even then.”
Gordon stood up, stepped over to the drinks, and poured himself another whiskey. Szőllősy’s face slowly began turning red. His wife listened with a broken, uncomprehending expression.
“That’s when you had a word with your private secretary,” said Gordon, sitting back down. “To take action. Your private secretary, isn’t that right?” He looked at Szőllősy. “I take your silence as a yes. Your secretary somehow turned up Pojva, a defrocked boxer and a booze-brained brute, to give your daughter a scare. Not a big scare, mind you, just a small one. Just enough so she’d come home. So the whole thing would be over. Pojva found Fanny on the sixth. I don’t think he was out to kill your daughter, and I have a hard time believing that you wanted that.” Gordon shook his head. “The only problem is that your secretary couldn’t have found a more unsuitable man than Pojva for the task. For him, giving the scare to a defenseless girl is the same as doing so to a strong guy. All you wanted was to have her beaten just a little, to have her robbed, so Fanny would come running on home. Things might even have turned out this way, though I doubt Fanny would have set foot in this house again.
“In case you’re interested, I know almost exactly what happened that night, because that’s how Pojva started off with me, too. Yes, ma’am”—Gordon nodded toward Mrs. Szőllősy—“your husband had Pojva sent after me, too, except that I lived through it. Your daughter
didn’t. But Pojva didn’t set out to kill her, let’s make that clear. He wanted to give her a scare. He socked her in the pit of the stomach. I got through it because I knew what to expect. But Pojva caught your daughter by surprise: he made a fist right away and hit.” Gordon turned to Szőllősy. “Of course, you’re a clever man. I figure you didn’t tell your secretary who the girl was whom Pojva was supposed to beat up. As for Pojva, he didn’t have a guilty conscience. He doesn’t have a conscience to begin with, as far as I can tell, but that’s another story. Your daughter died, and Pojva took the money from her purse—almost two thousand pengős. He then went on his way without even looking back. When you found out what had happened to Fanny, you acted fast. You looked up Bárczy, right?” Szőllősy was silent. “Yes, that’s what I figure you did. But what did you tell him that made him call off the investigation? How the hell did he convince Vladimir Gellért not to look into the case?”
Szőllősy said not a word as he tapped the ashes off his cigar.
“Talk, you wretch!” shouted his wife, grabbing the telephone up off the floor. “Talk, goddamnit, or I’ll strangle you with this phone cord!”
Szőllősy cast her a scornful stare. “I told him there was a prostitute who blackmailed me. If I didn’t pay her, she’d proclaim our doings far and wide.”
“And you told him you’d taken care of this girl,” said Gordon, “but you weren’t so sure that the cops wouldn’t land on your trail in the course of the investigation. But that’s not enough in and of itself. Is it big news, after all, that men of your ilk buy pleasure with cash?”
“It’s not,” said Szőllősy. “Bárczy knew that, too. So did everyone. But I wanted him to take me seriously. I told him that the . . . hooker”—he practically spit the word out—“didn’t blackmail me only with this, but with something else, too.”
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